The New Consulting Criminal
by geniusesnextdoor
Summary: Post-reichenbach. Sherlock returns, hoping everything will be the same but soon he realises that everything has changed. His relationship with John is completely different, his life is boring, and soon he begins to long for someone else. Sheriarty if you squint.


'Sherlock, why are you still in your dressing gown?' Sherlock looked up from the microscope and glanced across at the questioning man dressed in a beige jumper worn over a checked shirt. He could tell the shirt had been freshly ironed this morning, although not by the man wearing it. The collar was far too precise to have been done by him. Sherlock looked into his eyes for the briefest of moments before diverting them quickly back to the lens. 'Oh, I don't know,' he said, keeping his eyes down, sounding exasperated. 'Since you got rid of most of my clothes, and shopping isn't a supposedly dead man's top priority, it appears this is one of the only things left that I can wear.'

'Sherlock!' John exclaimed, slamming his hand down on the table which was laden with beakers and test tubes. They rattled as Sherlock looked up with a bored expression- however inside he was nervous. He managed to reach Johns eyes and he could see anger mixed with fear. 'Sherlock' he repeated and his voice broke on the second syllable. 'I… I thought you were dead. What was I supposed to do? His hands balled into fists. 'I thought you were dead!' he shouted. 'Look I'm going home. I'll see you tomorrow.' John spun on his heels and stalked out, slamming the door with such force that the entire house seemed to tremble in its wake.

Sherlock pushed his chair back and stood up whilst running his hands through his hair, the stony silence bouncing around the gun shot ridden walls. Only once he had seen John hail a taxi from the window did he crouch down in a chair, knees by his chin. He was wrong, he had been so wrong. Everything was different now. The ease he had always felt with John had vanished. All he wanted in the world was for everything to go back to normal. He longed for John to move back in and they could return to how it was, the blogger and the detective. Sherlock felt more alone now than he had when he was playing dead. And it wasn't just John's inability to forgive him that was preventing things from returning to how they used to be. You had to add Mary into the equation as well.

John's life was different because of Mary. Suddenly, he had to get home at a certain time and did not seem to leave her side at weekends. Time spent at 221b was becoming a rarity- and whenever the miracle did occur that John broke free from her clutches, it always ended the same, in shouting and hurt. Sherlock knew that John would always have girlfriends but this time it wasn't the same. Mary was different in John's eyes from the rest, but for the life of Sherlock, he could not deduce why. Ever since John had walked into St. Bart's, Sherlock had never doubted that they were meant to be together and no one could ever fracture their friendship, no matter how strained it might become. He thought that death would be the only thing to part them. And in a way, maybe it had.

If he was being honest though, now that he had become so estranged and alone and he could allow himself to look into the darkest corners of his already tainted and somewhat damaged soul, there was something else, or should he say someone, that he wanted besides John. Because life right now was unprecedentedly and predictably boring. So Sherlock allowed his mind to meander down into the deepest pit of his hidden heart.

Before the fall, Sherlock's life hadn't been dull. Before the fateful meeting on the rooftop, his brilliant brain had been tested and tried like it never had been before. And of course, the reason for that was simple. There had been a man. A man who spoke words of fire and dared to do what others would not. A man who had shook his hand whilst he thanked him and smiled with dead eyes as he told him riddles and fairy tales. A man that had told him that they were just alike and made for each other. And now, for the first time, Sherlock wondered if he was right. Because clearly he and John were not the complementary pair of puzzle pieces he had once thought that they were. Maybe he was meant to click with another.

Problem was that man had looked him dead in the eyes and blown a hole through his own brain.


End file.
